Seeing Forests

Love ya, Sebastien, and do believe you make some strong points concerning barriers to entry in the “Mo-Lo-So” space (I prefer to call it the “So-Lo-M(ee)O” space that you point out in your post.  The observations from Joi Ito are particularly well-said.  Still, I’m not buying some of the arguments that you make about [...]

This post on Techcrunch reminded me to mention this here.  I’ve watched BrightKite use both GetSatisfaction and Summize with Twitter to work out customer support issues and they’re obviously not alone in doing this.  I wonder how many YP Customer Support Tweets there are out there in the Twittersphere (I have no idea if I’m [...]

The most relevant Local 2.0 session from Where 2.0 was the Map Monetization session moderated by Greg Sterling. With Tiffany Chester from Block49 Lat49 (thanks Sebastien!), Ian White from Urban Mapping, Jed Rice from Skyhook Wireless, and Steve Pace from Open Street Map, the group overall presented some useful commentary. The upshot was [...]

It occurred to me that the battle for Nouns (domain names) is over but the battle for Pronouns (at least interrogative pronouns) wages.  Who (Facebook), What (Twitter), Where (Plazes), When (zVents) are all well-targeted (looks like Why still seems to be Blue Ocean).  It seems that ways of evaluating how well the Pronoun Play are [...]

I really enjoyed Greg’s moderation of the Monetizing Maps & Mashups panel discussion at Where 2.0.  It was a generally solid discussion albeit laced with a few too many acronyms even for my tastes.  The participants included Jed Rice from Skyhook Wireless who provided some keen insights.  Notable amongst them was the observation that there [...]

Off the O’Reilly Radar, Brady Forests notes that Platial Goes Local and Very Soon Mobile.  Looks like they’re getting nailed with some traffic issues but it is interesting in that they’re using the whole map as the interface, laying controls and filters on top.  Another one of those wish I’d have thought of it before [...]

I’ve checked into the offices of BrighKite the location-based social network. Former colleagues of mine, these guys are really hitting one out of the park when it comes to the integration of local and social. To me, the biggest concept they have is the notion of your “checking in” to a location. [...]

Wow.  Papa John’s passes $1 Billion in Pizza online orders/offline delivery. Greg’s post on Order (Pizza) Online, Deliver Locally and his notes on Circuit City and Wal-Mart’s success with “online ordering and offline pickup” really seem to reinforce the deconstruction of the buying cycle.  Imagine now providing a service that disaggregates the product so that people could [...]

Read/Write Web has a piece on Bizzlr (I was going to rank on it’s name but my company is Koano so I don’t have any room to talk).  I searched for it on Facebook, installed it, and gave it a starting city.  It prompted me to search for a restaurant (Sushi Den, natch), was first [...]

Greg kind of buries a great exposition on this topic in Marchex Gains, Beats Estimate. He differentiates Local as NOT YP and also not about Long Tail (which has always galled me anyway). He states that Local is about “transactions and the point of sale.” He notes how e-commerce is a side-line player in Local [...]